Norman Hampson was a great believer in the role of chance in shaping events

Norman Hampson, who has died aged 89, was the last of the mid-20th-century British historians, such as Alfred Cobban and Richard Cobb, whose detached and sceptical approach to the French Revolution blew apart the previously unchallenged orthodoxies of the classic French leftwing school. He made his name in 1963 with A Social History of the French Revolution, which is still in print and is one of the most accessible and fair-minded guides to a fearsomely complex episode. Its success made Norman an obvious choice to write the volume on the Enlightenment in the Pelican History of European Thought (1968), an elegant and succinct introduction which became perhaps the most widely read of of his works.

Nine further books on aspects of the French Revolution followed, including studies of Danton and Saint-Just, and most remarkably The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre (1974). This was not a biography, but a conversation between four imaginary characters, all representing different facets of the author's own outlook, illustrating the difficulties of coming to any objective conclusions about the revolution's most controversial figure.

Norman revelled in what he called "the rich anarchy of the evidence", which never yielded entirely unambiguous conclusions. Throughout his writings he resisted all forms of determinism, whether the Marxism so fashionable among revolutionary historians in his younger years, or the "cultural turn" – the fashion for seeing historical events primarily as symptoms of underlying cultural trends – which then became dominant. He was a great believer in the role of chance, which he saw as operating no differently in history than in everyday life.

Everything in his own life convinced him of this. Born in Greater Manchester, he was educated at Manchester grammar school. From his earliest years he was fascinated by ships and the sea, and when the second world war broke out he joined the navy. As a junior officer, he soon found the stuffiness of the wardroom uncongenial, and seized an opportunity to serve as a liaison officer on a Free French sloop, La Moqueuse. There, over several years of largely uneventful patrolling in the Mediterranean, he found a comradeship and unselfish commitment to liberty and fraternity that proved a lifelong inspiration in all he wrote. He acknowledged it warmly in his last book, an unjustly neglected memoir, Not Really What You'd Call a War (2001). Jacqueline Gardin, whom he married in 1948, was the sister of one of his French shipmates – "war booty", as he sometimes affectionately called her.

After the war Norman took up a place at University College, Oxford, where he studied the French Revolution with JM Thompson, the founder of the 20th-century British school of historians. On graduation he returned to Lancashire, to Manchester University, where he published his first book, a distillation in French of his Sorbonne doctoral thesis, on the revolutionary navy. He might have remained in Manchester had an unsympathetic head of department not ordered him to drop the French Revolution and teach the Renaissance. He moved with relief in 1967 to Newcastle, but in 1974 he was persuaded by Gerald Aylmer to move to the University of York. There, he found a young and expanding department, full of intellectual energy, offering plenty of opportunity for the small group teaching that he loved. He became head of the department in 1978.

Established in a grand house near to the campus, Norman and Jacqueline became famous for their entertaining, with magnificent French food and wine, although in his commitment to crosswords, gardening and cricket, the pipe-smoking Norman could hardly have seemed more quintessentially British. In France, however, which the Hampsons and their two daughters visited each year to see their family, he spoke the language fluently and lectured easily without notes. Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1980 (modestly but misleadingly claiming "it goes with the job"), he was also the unanimous choice of the newly founded Society for the Study of French History in 1987 to be its first president. Though he formally retired from York the next year, he continued to write and teach at the university until his late 70s. Only with the death of Jacqueline in 2007 did his intellectual energy begin to flag.

In a field of history that has always aroused strong passions and fierce disagreements, Norman was never confrontational. Like his favourite Enlightenment writer, Montesquieu, he enjoyed an argument, loved a paradox and preferred to make his points by irony rather than polemic. Accordingly he made no enemies. Yet he was a man of deep convictions, politically liberal and viscerally anti-authoritarian. He hated the totalitarian politics of Rousseau, and could find nothing redeeming in Marat or Saint-Just. Yet he was moved by the appeal of Rousseau's other writings to the deepest human feelings. He was even prepared to concede a "potential humanity" to Robespierre.

Norman's earliest ambition had been to be a poet, and during the war he had several short poems published. But he found his true vocation in promoting understanding in the English-speaking world of the French Revolution and the intellectual circumstances from which it arose.